Argos aims to circulate writing about topical matters of public and political import that is local, critical and accessible. We believe critical intellectual conversation should be heard here in Aotearoa-New Zealand, not simply published for credit in international fora for more limited and specialised audiences. Of particular interest to us is writing that grounds its concern with the public or political good of place-making in theory or philosophy.

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consensus

by Argos as You as Argos

...novation, or, to put it another way, knowledge creation becomes knowledge management. We reject this kind of 'end-stopped' thinking, which reduces thinking to mere calculation in advance and participation to the managed consensus of 'consultation,' in which even the strongest objections are considered merely 'positive feedback' and evidence of 'robust' processes. Instead of simply executing and extending such scripts, we ask after their rat...

...values, of those whose work it measures. Real governance occurs through constantly materialising people, processes, events and experiences, both within and at odds with representative hierarchies, which otherwise amounts to consensus by management. Such openness makes the university a hospitable pluriversity, a place of voices—and voicing—at once noisy and contested. Recognising that the competitive individualism of ‘originality’, ‘authorship’...

...judicial system, the government established two Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, proposing a politics of reconciliation that built an emotive framework for behaviour hinging on responsibility and the civic need to build consensus. Their expectations in this regard were well intentioned and largely understandable —to a certain point. Taken to an extreme, this collective sentiment could be seen to have become hostage to the politics of c...

...gathering information happens, often in the absence of ideas. Thought in this environment is something more often than not foreclosed or confined. Politics then, as a kind of thought, is in contradiction with the manufactured consensus of the university under capitalist democracy, in which real political thought is already foreclosed or confined to the margins. Again, the figure of the academic cries, ‘We have plenty of ideas’ — yes, but those id...

...nditional independence of thought resists such closure and finality by insisting upon what is never mastered. As its etymology suggests, unconditional is what cannot be agreed upon, what cannot be said, what is irreducible to consensus. As a teacher, what Derrida teaches is that without an unteachable we cannot teach and are not teachers. He argues for a transformative reaction to tradition, a re-activation that also produces something not only d...

...have already intimated, democracy is allergic to such closure or to such administration. To articulate this I wish to briefly turn to three philosophers: Jacques Rancière, who argues that democratic politics does not aim at consensus but is in fact a ‘rationality of disagreement’; Jan Patočka, who argued that democracy is tied to the birth of history, not its end; and Cornelius Castoriadis, who argued that democracy is the continual...

...h and refine ‘best practice’ – can be tracked courtesy of the annual Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. Here cognition is counted, collated and compared before being redistributed as an update of an emergent consensus. These are not just the calculations of key performance indicators of cognitive practice as decided by key performing cognitive practitioners; they are also, more nobly, numbers. The numbers speak for themselves. F...